The deadliest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s history has spread into a new province in the country’s north, health authorities said on Sunday, extending a five-month epidemic that is now unfolding along the border with the Central African Republic.
Congo’s Health Ministry said two cases, including one death, have been recorded in Nord-Ubangi province. Both patients were men in their 20s living in the Wapinda health zone, a remote area bordering Bas-Uele province, where Ebola cases had already been reported. The National Institute for Biomedical Research, Congo’s public health institute, confirmed the cases — the official confirmation of reports that two health officials had shared with Reuters four days earlier.
Nord-Ubangi becomes the eighth Congolese province hit by the outbreak, alongside North Kivu, Ituri, Haut-Uele, Tshopo, Sud-Kivu, Bas-Uele and South Ubangi. The outbreak, declared in mid-May, is driven by the Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus and has now produced at least 9,400 confirmed cases and more than 4,500 deaths — the country’s worst Ebola epidemic on record, and among the largest the world has ever seen.
Ituri province in eastern Congo remains the epicentre, accounting for almost three-quarters of confirmed cases, according to the government’s latest situation report, which recorded 67 new confirmed cases and 26 new deaths in the 24 hours to October 16. The disease has now been found in 66 health zones since May.
Officials describe a frustrating pattern: local clusters are shrinking, but the virus keeps finding new territory. “We see pockets of Ebola generally going down, but unfortunately geographically it’s spreading out,” Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the World Health Organization’s Regional Director for Africa, told the Associated Press in an interview in Beni, eastern Congo, on Friday. He said one of the biggest challenges has been convincing infected people to seek medical help, adding that some deaths occur in the community, outside health centers. In the Wamba health zone of Haut-Uele province, epidemiologist Serge Ngalebato said workers had begun periodic home visits because people were too afraid to go to hospital.
The geography of the new province is worrying. Nord-Ubangi sits between Sud-Ubangi and Bas-Uele, the last two provinces the disease reached along the border with the Central African Republic, where recurring armed violence has forced thousands of people to flee and take refuge in Congolese border communities. Access to the region is difficult — poor roads, limited communication networks, and moving populations. The virus has already crossed borders once: it spilled into neighbouring Uganda, which has since declared itself free of the disease, and into Kenya, which confirmed its seventh case earlier this month. The Central African Republic itself has recorded no confirmed cases so far.
Complicating the fight further is the strain itself. Unlike the Zaire strain that caused the devastating 2014–2016 West Africa epidemic, the Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine or treatment — early supportive care can be lifesaving, according to WHO, but containment rests on finding cases fast, tracing contacts, and isolating patients. The strain has caused only two earlier outbreaks: one in Uganda in 2007–08 and one in Isiro, Congo, in 2012.
That is why the expansion into Nord-Ubangi matters beyond Congo’s borders. An outbreak that is geographically spreading while running out of road-accessible communities to monitor is harder to contain with each new province — and with refugees crossing back and forth along the Central African Republic frontier, a border health emergency can become a regional one. The response’s biggest enemy, by the WHO’s own account, is not just the virus but fear: every community that hides its sick from health workers buys the virus another week to move.
